Review summary

Good points

Bad points

• Blacklight bleeding display

• Dull camera

• Performance isn’t as good as iPad & Transformer Prime

Our verdict

The new line of Toshiba tablets seem to be better than their predecessors – the Excite 10 looks the part, with a slim and thin design, it’s packed with a powerful processor and Android’s ICS, but we find that the display is lacklustre and the camera is one of most appalling of all the tablets – not the greatest Android tablet, but not the worst.

Full review

Toshiba haven’t had the greatest run of tablets in the past, they seem to be average on every front, and typically tragic in some areas. With the Excite series, we think they’ve finally put some juice into their tablets, but we still found a few areas that were very poor.

Display

Unlike its smaller companion, the 7.7 inch excite, this 10 inch one doesn’t come fitted with AMOLED display. A pixel density of 144ppi doesn’t sound or look that good, and even though I wouldn’t say I found the display appalling, there are some features which make it one of the poorer of the tablets.

I cannot complain that the display is bright and colours like bright green and velvet red do look very nice on the tablet, but when we go into the darker line of colours, we start to see some black bleeding from the display. You will find even when the tablet is meant to be dark; it still looks overexposed and bright.

Design

A premium feel for tablets seems to be metal and strong materials, materials that will last the winter. Of course, a more strong material like metal makes the tablet feel cold, industrial and sinister – it’s probably why many people enjoy the plastic feel of the Samsung phones so much, because at least it feels like those phones have life inside of them.

I’m glad to see Toshiba have gone against both, and went for an industrial premium feel, but with a sharp warm feeling too, with an aluminium backing, fitted with dimples for added grip.

While it feels like if you were to drop the Toshiba, it wouldn’t smash into a hundred pieces; it also doesn’t feel like there’s no warm heart inside of the machine.

Gorilla glass is what we are starting to see on every tablet and smartphone screen, it seems the best solution to screen problems at present. Of course, we are hoping sometime in the future we don’t have to rely on large covers to keep our phone screens safe, but for now, it’ll suffice our needs.

Operating System

It seems tablets are finally going to start getting fitted with the superior Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, after Honeycomb’s many years as the stale multitasking main tablet OS.

Android 4.0.3 to be precise, is the operating system Toshiba have chosen for their Excite series – unlike other tablet developers, they’ve decided to take the stock choice and not change the skin or remove/add some features.

This isn’t a miss in my view, for a find Android seem to do an overwhelmingly good job on their operating systems – and for the most part, the skins only reflect what the company is about. On that ideology though, it would seem Toshiba is about stock.

Apps

The traditional Google apps have been placed on the Toshiba tablet, g-mail, YouTube, voice, calendars, etc, along with some powerful 3rd party applications, like Adobe Reader and Netflix.

Again, there comes the issue of Android not having enough apps to supplement our taste buds, and the games that Toshiba have added are dull that they were deleted before we checked the store.

Tegra 3 makes the apps that you can play excitingly better though, with the quad-core graphic processor making 3D, smoke, water and other effects much more realistic, we enjoyed playing games that we could find on the Excite 10.

Features

The 128GB expandable memory slot has to be talked about, just because it is massive and could be even bigger according to some people. With some tablets opting out of SDcards altogether, it is a surprise to see Toshiba come out with such a bold statement that expandable memory is still around.

NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 graphics processor is another feature which we felt compelled to talk about, the quad-core monster makes the smallest and largest games look and feel much better – features like water splashes, flames, smoke and wind are added and the game runs so smoothly.

Connectivity

No 4G connectivity, but again, we didn’t expect this from a tablet that came out a while ago. The 3G slot it small but usable, and we found connections weren’t that bad on 3G networks. Of course, you can just opt for the Wi-Fi connection – which is pretty easy to set up.

Camera

Time and time again, we find cameras aren’t good on the tablet – overtime, I’ve found smaller tablets are better, so maybe the 7.7-inch version of this may do better.

The 10-inch camera with 5-megapixels isn’t very good though, images look washed out and dull, unless you have perfect light, but even then, the brightness becomes all fuzzy.

2-megapixels at the front seems decent, but on video-chats it seemed, again, pretty dull.

This was as expected for a 10-inch tablet with rather meagre specs – it seems Toshiba still haven’t clocked the formula to make a good camera on a 10-inch tablet.

Battery

The Toshiba battery will last a good twelve hours, that’s including web browsing, gaming and general tablet usage. While this isn’t great, it’ll keep most of us happy.

Overall

We feel that are is less to be happy about on the Toshiba than there should be for the price, while some areas give good features, others let us down. If you enjoy loads of storage, but not a lot of things to store, I guess you’ll enjoy this tablet. It has a solid processor and operating system too, but again, content seems to be lacking.

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